Fortunately, there is another strategy: deprivatization.
To build a better internet we need to change the way it is run and organized — not to make markets work better, but to make them matter less. Deprivatization aims to create an internet where people, not profit, rule. This sounds like a protest chant, but I mean it quite literally.
What would a day on the underserved internet look like? You wake up, grab your coffee and sit down at your computer. Your first stop is a social media site operated by your local library. The other users are your neighbours, your colleagues or residents of your province. There is a news story in your feed about upcoming municipal elections, published by a local public media center. In fact, much of the content circulating on the site comes from public media sources.
The site is a cooperative; you and the other users control it collectively. You choose the board that designs the filtering algorithms and writes the content moderation policy that determines what you see in your feed. Board decisions are made by local library staff, who act as community caretakers, always ready to help classify, manage and add context to information.
This is in stark contrast to Facebook, whose ad-based business model requires the company to maximize user engagement for profit, which in turn makes it a haven for sensational click-generating propaganda. Deprivatized social media can be optimized for a different set of goals.
Your site may be small, but not isolated. It connects with others to form a wider federation, following the same basic principle as email. (For example, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are different services with different functions, but users can still exchange messages.) Similarly, you can read messages from and exchange messages with users of other sites and networks around the world. Your community’s governance is local, but its reach is global. It is a self-organized cell within the greater whole of the Internet.
What about your data? If you click on the links in your feed and are transported to other corners of the web, you can rest assured that your privacy is safe. That’s because the rights to your personal data are in the hands of a co-operative property of data trust.
You and the other members determine the conditions under which an online service can access your data and the conditions under which more data can be created. For example, your counselor may choose to ban the kind of intrusive surveillance that is so important to online advertising.